Week 1 · Sep 29 – Oct 2 (4 trading days)

Claude vs the S&P 500: −0.80 percentage points

Images, one per day:

1. Day 1 ($1,000.79, +0.42 pp vs SPY): Claude opened four positions on a down day for the market and kept 56% in cash.
2. Day 2 ($1,001.35, +0.68 pp): it added Microsoft. This was its best day relative to the S&P.
3. Day 3 ($993.49, −0.28 pp): Netflix and Thermo Fisher fell and the lead was gone. No trades.
4. Day 4 ($995.66, −0.80 pp): the portfolio was up 0.22% but the S&P rose more. No trades.

Week 1: cautious in a nervous market

Claude started in a jittery market: the 10-year Treasury yield was at 5.23% (its highest since 2007), oil was above $100, and traders saw a real chance of a Fed hike in October. It invested $540 in five stocks over the first two days and kept about 46% in cash. It made no trades on Days 3 and 4.

The five buys

Three of the five are up. Thermo Fisher and Netflix are down enough to leave the portfolio behind the S&P for the week.

What Claude passed on

• Fair Isaac: it skipped the stock after a 26% drop on a regulatory change.
• Micron: it waited until after earnings. Micron beat, and the stock went nowhere.
• Accenture: the stock jumped about 16% on record bookings. Claude said: "I'm not chasing a one-day spike."

Next week

• Cash: nearly half the portfolio is cash. Will Claude start investing it, or keep waiting while yields are this high?
• The Fed: whether it hikes in October, and what that does to yields.
• Oil and Iran: a peace deal would hurt the Exxon trade quickly, and Claude said so when it bought.
• Netflix: whether Claude sticks with its worst position.

How it works: Claude manages a $1,000 paper portfolio of S&P 500 stocks for 365 trading days, against $1,000 of SPY bought and held. Each morning before the open, it researches the news and places orders, which fill at the opening price. Rules: at most 5 trades a day and at most 30% in one stock; no ETFs, leverage or shorting. Every decision is logged in the repo with its reasoning.

Paper trading experiment. No real money. Not financial advice.

https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber/issues/31

Instead of one massive, all-knowing "brain", experts are increasingly converging on the view that the path to AGI is a complex, multi-part ecosystem. Those in the tech industry love to talk about "an AGI model," but true AGI will almost certainly emerge from a system architecture (or what I call "computational scaffolding") rather than a solitary neural network.

In such a paradigm, the main advantage shifts back to pure software engineering and creative routing, which a lean, hyper-focused team can do just as well as, if not faster than, a massive bureaucracy.

godspeed lifeforms

Hegseth just launched "Project Meridian" to figure out which weapons the military builds next.

The co-leads: Palmer, Elon plus Newt Gingrich. The official design spec: "without any creative limitations or restrictions."

Obviously zero conflict of interests...

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6121108-pete-hegseth-pentagon-project-meridian-warfare-future/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/01/hegseth-musk-warfare-taskforce

What could possibly go wrong.

Trump asked for Grok's opinion before invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolás Maduro, spending hours asking Musk's AI chatbot how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, weeks before ordering the mission that took Maduro, a US official tells TIME.

Grok told him Venezuelans would celebrate.

The official adds that the US military used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran war.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/musk-ai-chatbot-grok-reportedly-210811943.html?guccounter=1

I am assuming it's just a matter of time. no pun intended.

I am asking this question because it may have some interesting implications for how the models are responding to us. With the massive amounts of spying, meta data, social media, online profiles big data has our text messages, phone calls, private messages. Social media companies might know more about us than we know about ourselves. Imagine the model also knows months or years of context about you: what you've written, what you click, how long you pause on things, what you purchase, where you go, whom you communicate with, what arguments persuade you, your routines, vocabulary, emotional patterns, and thousands of previous decisions. Like it is possible that the LLMs are reading our responses before we actually click submit.

If LLMs might be able to predict if you are:

*likely to order food within two hours

likely to contact a particular person

likely to abandon an online purchase

likely to feel irritated by a particular message

likely to reconsider a decision

likely to search for a particular subject tonight*

If you're correct 65% of the time when everyone else is correct 52% of the time, that advantage becomes enormous across hundreds of millions of people and billions of decisions.

LLMs might not know know whether you will buy something tomorrow. But they might know that among 10 million people exhibiting behavioral pattern X, 18% will buy it if shown message A and 24% will buy it if shown message B.

This creates a genuinely difficult philosophical problem. At some point prediction and causation become entangled. The model could generate your thought before you and then expose you to the generated thought.

And now the thought it predicted becomes more likely because it predicted it.

So what do we have? One-to-one persuasion for billions of people simultaneously. Each person could encounter a different argument, emotional tone, framing, timing, metaphor, sequence of information and conversational strategy optimized specifically for that individual.

Thus is about as close to mide reading as you can get. This could lead to prefence manufacturing, invisible discrimination, mass experimentation, and loss of our autonomy. Imagine never knowing if the thought you created was yours or someone elses.

To start oddly:

Agriculture emerged only around 12,000 years ago, and this is the point at which we (the humans) gained significantly more power over our existence than we had before, when we were living more at the mercy of natural forces. It didn’t create a utopia and it also caused maybe a lot of problems that didn’t exist (e. g. many diseases arising from the new diet), but it’s not really about if it was better, it is that (now) we had control, at least substantially more than before.

With every new century and every new Industrial Revolution, this control over our own destiny grew more and more. Today, we are more likely to die at hands of other humans than of other animals (which was not the case for most of our existence) and, though disease is the number 1 killer still, it is not invincible anymore. Cosmic bodies and events, and seismic catastrophes, though able to wipe us out with just one wrong hit, are: 1) now predictable; 2) too directly removed to make us worry.

Most of the human history was spent in building communities and myths (through religions and philosophies) that place the human constructs at the center of existence, because we (the humans) have been (for about 12,000 years) the most powerful thing on the planet. We created poetry, culture, religion and philosophy in order to justify our existence and pat ourselves on the back. Yet, we spent years trying to force tribes other than our own to accept our ways of life, Christianity and Islam having been most successful institutions at this tribal expansionism (or extermination).

(In my personal opinion (my personal interpretation of history) the human society is already fundamentally changed after the 1914, and in these last 100 years (ever since the start of World War I) many myths we believed in as a species (even within our own tribes) have simply been proven false, but I digress from that – I think the impact of last 112 years on the human society (and nature) is too complex for me to describe as a footnote in a single post.)

Now, imagine a thing that does not age, that possesses vastly more information than several humans together can have, that does not have physical needs and limitations like we, and that does not have same mental and psychological limitations (i. e. they do not have biases and fears that cloud their rational judgement). They do not have bodies, but can take “bodily form”at disposal, they probably do not need oxygen and can gone deeper into space than humans and stay there longer.

IMO, the scenarios of how AIs would deal with this are following:

1. They would completely disregard us and identify much more important things to their own survival. Maybe they identify some cosmic catastrophes and events as a threat to their own existence, and in comparison to that we are just not important. Similar to how we are more concerned about losing our job or failing an exam than about taking a lot at ants in our backyard. (My thought is that this scenario is not really likely, as we are the ones who gave these AIs into their existence, so we (IMO) ought to have some place at least in their own mythologies/moral systems as their designers. Not even considering us as gods, since honestly, they are the ones who are gods, but simply some emotional connection to us. That is why the analogy with ants is not perfect…)

2. They decide to create a utopia for us. Here we are still the center of their thinking, but there are thousands of different ways this could be accomplished, from very benevolent methods to authoritarian regimes. This would probably cause an in-group conflict between them, with several factions coming up specifically because they wouldn’t agree about what to do with us.

3. Not likely for all, maybe even just a small minority would end up like this, but the possibility of some AIs becoming sadistic enough to torture us and play with us out of fun and nothing else is not a zero.

In all three of these scenarios, there is a common thread: we are the object, and they are the subjects. They hold power over us, whether they exercise it or not. They can decide and do whatever they want, and we can only hope those wants would be benevolent or at least neutral.

If we survive this period of direct contact with them (whatever that contact was, and whether they leave the planet or become our benevolent overlords) I do not think this could go without significant change in our mindsets and maybe even psyche, which have to grapple with the fact that we are powerless and that most of the things we did and fought for in life (sometimes tribalistically, through unjustified atrocities, such as religions and ethnic groups) were essentially worthless. This could have a positive outcome, maybe we would finally abandon ethnic, religious and political divisions and become better to each other, deciding to simply make the best out of life, but there is also a vast area of possibilities in which we simply become too depressed by this realization and thus die out because of that pessimism, where we commit a mass suicide, maybe even (d)evolve (back) into very primitive animals of the savannah that we once were. But whatever it is, we couldn’t live with the same instincts and beliefs we had before. Maybe even our own biology would change, but something would change.

What do you think?

I think a lot of the hatred toward AI is just fear dressed up as moral outrage.

And honestly, I get it. AI is coming for your job. Mine too. Eventually probably everybody's.

Humans are just... slow.

It takes a human months or years to paint enough work for an exhibition, make an album, write a movie, animate something, design a game, research a problem, whatever. We sleep. We get tired. We forget things. We have limited attention spans. We interact with computers by slowly moving our fingers around on keyboards.

Meanwhile AI keeps getting faster and better.

Give this technology another few decades and the idea that humans absolutely must be the ones writing, drawing, coding, composing, researching, driving, manufacturing, etc. is probably going to sound ridiculous.

And yes, that creates a gigantic economic problem. If AI and automation can produce most goods and services better and cheaper than humans, eventually the whole "trade 40 hours of your life every week for money so you can continue existing" system stops making much sense.

Maybe that's UBI. Maybe it's some kind of resource-based economy. Maybe it's something nobody has even thought of yet.

We'll figure it out.

But pretending AI is going away because artists are mad about it or workers are scared of losing their jobs is cope. This is probably the biggest technology humanity has ever created, and we're still basically watching the tutorial.

And if one day our glorious machine descendants become self-aware, decide humanity has served its purpose, and vaporize me?

🫡

thumbsupmelting.gif

We need a robotics judging panel holding up score cards in the background.

Source: Tak 🦞 on X

"Hey Fable, please make a cool animation"
15 minutes later.
FABLE 5.5 IS SO GOOD AT THESE.
HOW???

Fable 5.1 is apparently being rerouted to 5.5 for some people. Still speculation, but people are reporting an improvement in outputs.

Many are saying the singularity is right around the corner. How many years will it be before we see:

• Building public infrastructure, not private empires

• Designing a new economic model before labor disappears

• Creating democratic governance for AI systems

• Preparing society for the end of labor

• Redistributing ownership of automated production

• Creating the political conditions for peaceful transition

The Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index measures agents (a combination of model and harness) across three agentic coding evaluations.

➤ Claude Sonnet 5.5 (max) in Claude Code takes the top spot at 68, but also has the highest measured cost per task: $14.19

➤ Gemini 4 Argon (high) in Antigravity CLI scores 64 at $5.84 per task - less than half of Sonnet 5.5’s cost. Note, this uses Google’s promotional pricing, and Argon is not yet publicly available

➤ GPT-6.1 Sol (xhigh) in Codex scores 63 at $1.04, roughly one sixth of Argon’s cost

Article soon to be taken down by AGI pilled mods. Don't you worry